Month: October 2024

Hey, look! It's comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS:

I couldn't see it on Saturday with the naked eye, and most of my test pictures didn't show it either. The exposure had to be just right. But it will be a little higher tonight—and therefore in darker skies—which makes it more visible. Tomorrow will probably be even better. Then it's a race against time as it gets higher in the sky but also farther from the sun.

To see it, look due west about 50 minutes to an hour after sunset.

Is MAGA Nation still obsessing over weather control? Here's an update:

It looks like MAGA is moving on to newer and better conspiracy theories. Weather control isn't holding up compared to Al Pacino, although it's doing better than poor Geoffrey Hinton, who got a day or two in the sun and then plunged back into oblivion. Another few days and the hurricane creation machines will all be forgotten.

As time goes by, it becomes ever clearer why we suffered our recent bout of inflation. It's pretty straightforward:

• The pandemic caused supply to decline.
• The CARES Act, passed immediately after the pandemic started, kept demand high.

That's it. If supply goes down and demand goes up, you get inflation. When supply recovers, inflation goes down. This explains about 90% of what happened.

Here's a more detailed look at what happened. First, supply chains got snarled. After a brief recovery, they remained snarled all the way through the end of 2021:

Industrial production declined. By the end of 2020 it was 6% below its pre-pandemic level, and even by the end of 2021 it was still down 2%:

But consumer demand remained strong. By the end of 2020 nominal spending was 8% higher than its pre-pandemic level:

The result was exactly the kind of inflation you'd expect:

Inflation in goods, especially in durable goods that were in short supply, began to rise almost immediately and was already nearing 5% by the end of 2020. Conversely, inflation in services, which depends more on wages than on shortages, took longer to appear because wage increases generally follow price increases.

Is there more to the story? A little bit. Housing inflation appeared late and was affected by interest rate hikes. The Ukraine war raised oil prices for a while. Ukraine and some other factors affected food prices. The Biden stimulus kept demand high. But none of these things were the source of inflation. At most they extended it a bit.

So that's it: Inflation = Pandemic + CARES Act. Those two things started it, and when they faded out they ended it. Neither Joe Biden nor the Fed played more than a minor role.

Here's a story you probably never expected to see:

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday announced charges against three young people who they say robbed a string of banks across Northern California last year by using Instagram to recruit women to walk into financial institutions and pass the tellers notes demanding money.

....The indictment says Jones and Millett, both of Northern California, “actively sought and groomed recruits” to go into banks with notes demanding money. Millett posted videos of herself on Instagram holding large amounts of cash, according to the indictment. “Happy Money Makin’ Mondays,” she allegedly said in one post. “I got one spot left in a car tap in.” In another post, the indictment quotes her as saying: “I don’t need mfs that’s scared to get money around me so if it’s not even for you please don’t vote.”

Look, I know the world is crazy these days, but what kind of moron responds to an Instagram appeal for bank robbers? I mean.

OTOH, count this as a win for the folks who think social media is ruining our mental health.

Beginning around 2000, universities began to consistently add more women than men to their ranks of new assistant professorships:

As a result, in 2013 women began to outnumber men:

As of 2022, women held 54.4% of all assistant professorships.

Note that is an average. The numbers obviously vary tremendously among different academic fields.

This is remarkable. Four-star generals are not typically ones to lob around the word fascist. But Milley did.

Here's a weird story. You may recall that a few months ago someone—we don't know for sure who—leaked a hacked dossier of information about JD Vance. The dossier had been compiled by the Trump campaign while they were vetting Vance and was relatively uninteresting. We know that because every single news outlet that received the dossier declined to publish it or even write about it, and lack of newsworthiness was the stated reason.

This unanimity struck a lot of people as a bit odd coming from a press corps that had reported a few years earlier on John Podesta's hacked risotto recipe. Yes, really. But finally Ken Klippenstein broke ranks and posted the entire thing. He made it available via Twitter, which blocked the link and then closed Klippenstein's account because, allegedly, publishing hacked material violated Twitter's rules.

But that turned out not to be the real reason. Today the New York Times reported what actually happened:

After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.

Twitter suspended Klippenstein's account because Donald Trump asked them to. Shortly after this was made public they tacitly admitted the story was true by reinstating Klippenstein's account. Here is Klippenstein's take on what happened:

The media’s decision not to report on the dossier’s contents — and what it says about Vance — is the result of government pressure and interference. The media blackout laid the groundwork for X to actively suppress my story when I decided to publish the dossier in full, empowering the Trump campaign to successfully push for having links to my article taken down not just from X but also from Instagram, Facebook, and Google Docs. Even the major media, which are plenty critical of Trump, would not cover the clearly newsworthy document. Why? Because they are reluctant to break from the position taken by the Intelligence Community, the White House, the political campaigns, and the social media and Internet companies. These virtual censors have profound influence over what the public can and cannot see.

I'm not sure I've seen any evidence of government pressure here. In fact, I'm not sure I've seen any evidence that any agency of the government cared one way or the other if the dossier was published. Obviously there was interest in finding out who hacked the documents, since that's illegal, but nobody cared much about the contents themselves.

This is really the oddest part of the whole story. Why hack such a worthless batch of documents in the first place? Why refuse to publish them if they contained nothing defamatory or legally questionable? Why pressure Twitter to take down links to something that wasn't harmful to the Trump campaign?

I suppose we may never know. But there's one thing we do know: Elon Musk's dedication to free speech apparently has its limits. When Trump calls, it turns out his principles become suddenly and distinctly malleable.

Today New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked JD Vance over and over and over whether he believed Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Naturally he refused to answer:

Vance's refusal to answer doesn't really bug me. Whatever. What does bug me is his smug cleverness in pretending that the real issue is that the media massively censored news of Hunter Biden's laptop and "analysts" think this cost Trump millions of votes.

I know JD doesn't care, but for the millionth time there was no censorship. Twitter took down links to the story for about 24 hours. Facebook limited distribution a little bit. The mainstream media all wrote about it, but only after they could confirm the story—which Rudy Giuliani deliberately made difficult by withholding the evidence he claimed to have.

That's it. That's the massive censorship. It never happened.

What's going on with Truth Social stock? It was steadily declining and then abruptly turned around on September 24. What happened on September 24 to suddenly rekindle the hopes of the faithful?

Behold the top of the New York Times front page at this moment in time:

It's not that all the Trump stories are positive. They aren't. It's that Trump is allowed to set the agenda for political coverage almost single-handedly. Do they even know they're doing it? I wonder sometimes. It's like Steve Jobs's infamous reality distortion field: you get sucked in whether you want to or not. That's Trump and the media these days.